Few artists have contributed seminal works to as many genres as Bruce Conner (1933-2008). An assemblage artist famed for his use of nylon stockings, he also pioneered the use of found footage and the high-speed film editing now familiar to us from MTV, and was one of the earliest filmmakers to use pop and soul music on his soundtracks. In the 1960s, Conner collaborated with Toni Basil (of “Mickey” fame) on his dance film Breakaway, and in the 1970s with Devo, David Byrne and Brian Eno on music videos. This survey examines the formal parallels between Conner’s works as an artist and filmmaker, and looks at drawings, oil and acrylic paintings, lithographs, prints, photograms and photographs alongside three of Conner’s best-known films: Breakaway(1966), Crossroads(1976), and Marilyn Times Five(1968-1973).

Timely and wide-ranging, this volume explores in-depth the theme of destruction in international contemporary art. While destruction as a theme can be traced throughout art history, from the early atomic age it has remained a pervasive and compelling element of contemporary visual culture. Damage Control features the work of more than 40 international artists working in a range of media—painting, sculpture, photography, film, installation, and performance—who have used destruction as a means of responding to their historical moment and as a strategy for inciting spectacle and catharsis, as a form of rebellion and protest, or as an essential part of re-creation and restoration. Including works by such diverse artists as Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pipilotti Rist, Yoshitomo Nara, and Laurel Nakadate, the book reaches beyond art to enable a broader understanding of culture and society in the aftermath of World War II, under the looming fear of annihilation in the atomic age, and in the age of terrorism and other disasters, real and imagined.

Formed by Harvey S. Shipley Miller and donated to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2005, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection was conceived to be the widest possible cross-section of contemporary drawing made primarily within the past 20 years, surveying gestural and geometric abstraction, representation and figuration, systems-based and conceptual work, as well as appropriation and collage. While the collection primarily focuses on the work of artists living and working in what are widely regarded as five major centers of visual art today–New York, Los Angeles, London/Glasgow, Berlin and Cologne/Dusseldorf–it also includes artists from 30 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. Established artists such as Jasper Johns are represented through examples of recent work, while others, such as Joseph Beuys and Philip Guston, are highlighted through core historic groupings, and still others are shown in a comprehensive overview of their careers, including Alighiero e Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Ray Johnson, Anish Kapoor, Franz West, Bruce Conner and Hannah Wilke. Minimal and Conceptual drawings from the 1960s and 1970s acquired by the Foundation from New York-based collectors Eileen and Michael Cohen are juxtaposed with major works by self-taught artists including James Castle, Henry Darger, Ele D’Artagnan and Pearl Blauvelt, representing a diverse anthology of works on paper. Additional highlights, both contemporary and historic, include works by Tomma Abts, Kai Althoff, Robert Crumb, Tacita Dean, Peter Doig, Angus Fairhurst, Mark Grotjahn, Richard Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Charline von Heyl, Christian Holstad, Roni Horn, Ellsworth Kelly, Martin Kippenberger, Roy Lichtenstein, Sherrie Levine, Lee Lozano, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Jennifer Pastor, Elizabeth Peyton, Adrian Piper, Paul Thek, Richard Wright and Andrea Zittel.
D.A.P. is pleased to offer two extraordinary volumes dedicated to this extraordinary collection–published to accompany a major exhibition–as well as this boxed set that includes both. Reminiscent of the classic 2002 MoMA catalogue Drawing Now the first of these volumes, Compass in Hand, brings together approximately 250 representative works. The second, The Judith Rothschild Collection of Contemporary Drawings, is a complete catalogue raisonne.

A collection of artists’ books by: Marina Abramovic, Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Ida Applebroog, Armando, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, Richard Artschwager, Enrico Baj, Guido Ballo, John Baldessari, Miroslaw Balka,Balthus, Georg Baselitz, Marius Bauer, Merina Beekman, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, David Bunn, Chris Burden, Eduardo Chillida, Catherine Claeyé, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, Jean Cocteau, George Hugnet, Bruce Conner, Michael Craig-Martin, Olafur Eliasson, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Tristan Tzara, Anya Gallaccio, Ryan Gander, Alberto Giacometti, Gilbert & George, Pim van Halem, Jonathan Hammer, Sjoerd Hofstra, John Billingham, Jörg Immendorf, Xu Pei, Rein Jansma, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Klee, Jannis Kounellis, Barbara Kruger, Stephen King, André Lanskoy, Henri Laurens, Richard Long, Kasper Andreasen, Tine Melzer, Christien Meindertsma, Sophie Calle , Constant Nieuwenhuys / Gerrit Kouwenaar, Guiseppe Penone, Sigmar Polke, Ken Price / Charles Bukowski, Robert Rauschenberg, David Sandlin, Koosje Schmeddes, Sean Scully, Kiki Smith, Nicolas de Staël, Antoni Tàpies, Andrea Tippel, Richard Tuttle, Damian van der Velden, herman de vries, Hans Waanders, Kara Walker, Alicja Werbachowska, Christopher Wool, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Éluard, Marino Marini, Alicia Martin, Paul McCarthy, Jason Roades, Jack Milroy, René Char, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Octavio Paz, Roman Ondak, Henk Peeters, Edward Ruscha, Man Ray, Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Miró, Fernand Leger, Sol LeWitt, Henry Matisse, A.R. Penck, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner.

One of the premier institutions of contemporary art in the country, the Walker Art Center also holds an important collection of over 11,000 objects from the early 20th century to the present. These holdings reflect the Center’s renowned multidisciplinary program, and include paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, film, video, installations, and digital arts that range in date from classic early modernist to cutting edge contemporary. While aiming to represent the immense diversity in art-making around the world, the collection also is known for several areas of specialty including Minimalism, Arte Povera, Fluxus, and contemporary printmaking. In-depth representations of work by individual artists, including Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, William Klein, Robert Motherwell, and Kara Walker reflect the Center’s long and close relationships with many of the century’s most creative minds. Showcased in this stunning, expansive, well-designed volume are more than 650 beautifully reproduced works of art. Co-authored by the Walker’s curators and staff, and more than 30 Walker alumni, this book draws heavily on Walker archival material to serve as both a history of the institution and a primer on modern and contemporary art. Adding further dimension to the polyvocal, multifaceted rendition of this dynamic public art center are contributions from a select group of acclaimed writers including, A.S. Byatt, Joshua Clover, Arthur Danto, Dave Eggers, Darby English, Annie Proulx, David Shapiro, and others. The catalogue is published in conjunction with the Spring 2005 re-opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center. Artists include Matthew Barney, Chuck Close, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Merce Cummingham, Dan Flavin, Robert Gober, Dan Graham, David Hockney, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, William Klein, Sherrie Levine, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Sharon Lockhart, Kerry James Marshall, Bruce Nauman, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Charles Ray, Edward Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Frank Stella, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and many others. Edited by Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter. Essays by Elizabeth Alexander, A.S. Byatt, Dave Eggers, Arthur C. Danto, Wayne Koestenbaum, James Lingwood, Linda Nochlin, Annie Proulx, David Shapiro, Charles Simic, Howard Singerman, Hamza Walker et al.

Containing ten essays and over 250 illustrations, this impressive catalog of the controversial show at the Whitney Museum (Nov. 9, 1995-Feb. 4, 1996), put together by the curator, documents the pervasive influence of the Beat Generation on American art and culture. The exhibit includes manuscripts, photographs, and artwork by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as work by several West Coast artists, including Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Robert Lavigne. Essay topics, stressing shared artistic and cultural concerns, range from African American influences on the Beat Generation to the aesthetics of Beat filmmaking. A detailed chronology rounds out the book.

Television emerged as the dominant mass medium in the United States during the era that President John F. Kennedy termed the New Frontier. Although television would soon be decried as “a vast wasteland,” during this era artists began to engage with the medium in a sustained manner for the first time–and not just as an object to be pictured, but as a system that demanded a renegotiation of the relationship between the realms of art and life. The New Frontier is the catalogue of the first exhibition to examine the impact of television on the visual arts in the United States at a crucial period in the development of both. With a lively selection of nearly seventy-five paintings, sculptures, installations, films, videos, photographs, and documents from the United States and Europe, it explores how twenty artists, including Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Lee Friedlander, Dennis Hopper, Edward Kienholz, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Garry Winogrand, responded to the increased prominence of television in daily life during the early 1960s. Working in modes and styles as varied as collage and assemblage, Pop Art, Color Field Painting, Fluxus, Performance Art, and documentary photography, these artists engaged with the perceptual, technological, and social changes catalyzed in part by the emergence of television as the dominant mass medium.

Due in large part to the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the crash of TWA Flight 800, and the O. J. Simpson trial, the once-arcane field of forensics has taken hold of the popular imagination. Scene of the Crime, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum and supported by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, considers the art object as a kind of forensic evidence. Like the chalk outline of a murdered body, certain works of art invoke off-screen drama, prior trauma, or a history redolent of criminality, violation, or mysterious turbulence. From the evidentiary traces presented in these exhibits, the viewer is prompted to reconstruct behavior, motivations, and events. This forensic approach emphasizes the viewer’s role as investigator while underscoring the cluelike and contingent status of the art object. The book is not about works of art that simply document criminal acts. Rather, it is about a strain of art that presents the art object as a clue to absent meanings or actions. From seminal works by Ed Ruscha, Bruce Naumann, Barry Le Va, and David Hammons to recent works by Paul McCarthy, Sharon Lockhart, James Luna, and Anthony Hernandez, this art declares that it is about more than meets the eye, raising the suspicion that a significant segment of contemporary art is concerned with forensic strategies and demands an investigative approach. Artists: Terry Allen, D-L Alvarez, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Uta Barth, Nayland Blake, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Eileen Cowin, John Divola, Sam Durant, Vincent Fecteau, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Janet Fries, David Hammons, Richard Hawkins, Anthony Hernandez, Alexander Jason, Mike Kelley, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Barry Le Va, Sharon Lockhart, James Luna, Monica Majoli, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Paul McCarthy, Richard Misrach, Bruce Nauman, Robert Overby, Nancy Reese, Michelle Rollman, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, George Stone, Jeffrey Vallance.

Hippie Modernism examines the art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The catalogue surveys the radical experiments that challenged societal norms while proposing new kinds of technological, ecological and political utopia. It includes the counter-design proposals of Victor Papanek and the anti-design polemics of Global Tools; the radical architectural visions of Archigram, Superstudio, Haus-Rucker-Co and ONYX; the installations of Ken Isaacs, Joan Hills, Mark Boyle, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida; the experimental films of Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner and John Whitney; posters and prints by Emory Douglas, Corita Kent and Victor Moscoso; documentation of performances by the Diggers and the Cockettes; publications such as Oz and The Whole Earth Catalog; books by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; and much more.
While the turbulent social history of the 1960s is well known, its cultural production remains comparatively under-examined. In this substantial volume, scholars explore a range of practices such as radical architectural and anti-design movements emerging in Europe and North America; the print revolution in the graphic design of books, posters and magazines; and new forms of cultural practice that merged street theater and radical politics. Through a profusion of illustrations, interviews with figures including Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan of USCO, Gunther Zamp Kelp of Haus-Rucker-Co, Ken Isaacs, Ron Williams and Woody Rainey of ONYX, Franco Raggi of Global Tools, Tony Martin, Clark Richert and Richard Kallweit of Drop City, and new scholarly writings, this book explores the conjunction of the countercultural ethos and the modernist desire to fuse art and life.

This reprint of the now classic and much sought-after 2005 volume celebrates the circle of the quintessential visual artist of the Beat era, Wallace Berman (1926-76), who remains one of the best-kept secrets of the postwar era. A crucial figure in California’s underground culture, Berman was a catalyst who traversed many different worlds, transferring ideas and dreams from one circle to the next. His larger community is the subject of Semina Culture, which includes previously unseen works by 52 artists. Anchoring this publication is Semina, a loose-leaf art and poetry journal that Berman published in nine issues between 1955 and 1964. Although printed in extremely short runs and distributed to only a handful of friends and sympathizers, Semina is a brilliant and beautifully made compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of its time, and is today a very rare collector’s item. Showcasing the individuals that defined a still-potent strand of postwar counterculture, Semina Culture outlines the energies and values of this fascinating circle. Also reproduced here are works by those who appear in Berman’s own photographs, approximately 100 of which were recently developed from vintage negatives, and which are seen here for the first time. These artists, actors, poets, curators, musicians and filmmakers include Robert Alexander, John Altoon, Toni Basil, Wallace Berman, Ray Bremser, Bonnie Bremser, Charles Britten, Joan Brown, Cameron, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, Diane DiPrima, Kirby Doyle, Bobby Driscoll, Robert Duncan, Joe Dunn, Llyn Foulkes, Ralph Gibson, Allen Ginsberg, George Herms, Jack Hirschman, Walter Hopps, Dennis Hopper, Billy Jahrmarkt, Jess, Lawrence Jordan, Patricia Jordan, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, William Margolis, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Taylor Mead, Henry Miller, Stuart Perkoff, Jack Smith, Dean Stockwell, Ben Talbert, Russ Tamblyn, Aya (Tarlow), Alexander Trocchi, Edmund Teske, Zack Walsh, Lew Welch and John Wieners.

With contributions by Sabeth Buchmann, Mercedes Bunz, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kodwo Eshun, Anselm Franke, Erich Hörl, Norman M. Klein, Maurizio Lazzarato, Flora Lysen, Eva Meyer, John Palmesino, Laurence Rickels, Bernd M. Scherer, Fred Turner In the year 1966, a young man named Stewart Brand handed out buttons in San Francisco reading: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Two years later, the NASA photograph of the “blue planet” appeared on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. In creating the catalogue, frequently described as the analogue forerunner of Google, Brand had founded one of the most influential publications of recent decades. It mediated between cyberneticists and hippies, nature romantics and technology geeks, psychedelia and computer culture, and thus triggered defining impulses for the environmentalist movement and the rise of the digital network culture. The photo of the blue planet developed a sphere of influence like almost no other image: it stands not only for ecological awareness and crisis but also for a new sense of unity and globalization. The universal picture of “One Earth” hence anticipated an image of the end of the Cold War, whose expansion into space it accompanied, and overwrote or neutralized political lines of conflict by transferring classical politics and criticism of it to other categories, such as cybernetic management or ecology. The exhibition “The Whole Earth” is an essay composed of cultural-historical materials and artistic positions that critically address the rise of the image of “One Earth” and the ecological paradigm associated with it. The accompanying publication includes image-rich visual essays that explore key themes: “Universalism,” “Whole Systems,” “Boundless Interior,” and “Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation,” among others. These are surrounded by critical essays that shed light onto 1960s California and the networked culture that emerged from it. Artists: Nabil Ahmed, Ant Farm, Eleanor Antin, Martin Beck, Jordan Belson, Ashley Bickerton, Dara Birnbaum, Erik Bulatov, Angela Bulloch, Bruce Conner, Öyvind Fahlström, Robert Frank, Jack Goldstein, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Lawrence Jordan, Silvia Kolbowski, Philipp Lachenmann, David Lamelas, Sharon Lockhart, Piero Manzoni, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Robert Rauschenberg, Ira Schneider, Richard Serra, Alex Slade, Jack Smith, Josef Strau, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Otolith Group, Suzanne Treister, Andy Warhol, Bruce Yonemoto, et al.

Contributions on Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baille, Robert Breer, James Broughton, Bruce Conner, Tony Conrad, Joseph Cornell, Larry Jordan, Robert Nelson, Pat O’Neill, Larry Gottheim, Barry Gerson, Peter Kubelka, Marie Menken, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Morgan Fisher, George Landow, Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, Paul Sharitz, Harry Smith, Michael Snow, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert and Yvonne Rainer.

This expanded edition of the fall 1994 special issue of October includes new essays by Sarat Maharaj and by Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. It also includes the transcript of an exchange between T. J. Clark and Benjamin Buchloh which presents new responses to the problems raised by this immediately popular (and now out of print) issue of the journal.

The Duchamp Effect is an investigation of the historical reception of the work of Marcel Duchamp from the 1950s to the present, including interviews by Benjamin Buchloh (with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Morris), Elizabeth Armstrong (with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner), and Martha Buskirk (with Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Fred Wilson) and a round-table discussion of the Duchamp effect on conceptual art.

Contents

Introduction ∑ Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde? ∑ Hal Foster
Typotranslating the Green Box ∑ Sarat Maharaj
Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris ∑ Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner ∑ Elizabeth Armstrong
Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism ∑ Thierry de Duve
Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg ∑ Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse
Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louis Lawler, and Fred Wilson ∑ Martha Buskirk
Thoroughly Modern Marcel ∑, Martha Buskirk
Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp ∑ October Round Table
All the Things I Said about Duchamp: A Response to Benjamin Buchloh ∑ T. J. Clark
Response to T. J. Clark ∑ Benjamin Buchloh

In 1950s California, and especially in Los Angeles, there existed few venues for contemporary art. To a whole generation of California artists, this presented a freedom, since the absence of a context for their work meant that they could coin their own, and in uncommonly interesting ways. The careers of Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz all begin with this absence: Ruscha turned to books as a means of dissemination, Berman pioneered mail art through his magazine Semina and in March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California’s greatest historical galleries, Ferus. Within months of opening, Ferus, which is Latin for “wild,” gained notoriety when the Hollywood vice squad raided Berman’s first–and, in his lifetime, last–solo exhibition, following a complaint about “lewd material.” Shows by Kienholz and Jay DeFeo followed, but 1962 was Ferus’ annus mirabilis, with solo shows by Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, and the first solo shows of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on the west coast. The following year, Ferus also hosted Ed Ruscha’s first solo exhibition. After Kienholz and Hopps parted ways–Hopps went on to mount the first American Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Musuem–the reins were handed to Irving Blum, who got Ferus out of the red and ran the gallery until its closure in 1966. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art. Edited by Kristine McKenna, noted expert and co-editor of the critically acclaimed Semina Culture.

This is the first publication to explore the role of mirrors, spinning, and “neurotic” architecture – a feeling of psychological breakdown – in the work of one of America’s most important contemporary artists, Paul McCarthy (b. 1945). The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Whitney, for which McCarthy is creating two new installations to appear alongside his Bang Bang Room (1992) and two recently rediscovered film loops (1966, 1971).Each work involves a room structure that the viewer can step into and experience, often becoming disoriented as either the floor or entire structure spins, or as walls fold inward and outward. By comparing McCarthy’s use of rotational movement and visual effects to that of other artists of the 1960s and ’70s, the author seeks a new understanding of this bold innovator. An interview with McCarthy himself offers an unprecedented discussion of the influences on his art, including experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, and Bruce Conner. The book not only raises new points but also recovers information and images from films once lost.

Visual art in the period following World War II witnessed landmark transformations. Today, drawing provides a powerful and vigorous device for reexamining the art of that period, and for renewing appreciation of the extraordinary achievements of well-known artists–and for discovering others. Even though the art of these years saw radical departures and shifts, drawing, which is among the most traditional of media, played a crucial and consistent role in the work of a great majority of the most significant artists. Drawing from the Modern, 1945-1975, surveys the drawing of the period through the unparalleled holdings of the drawings collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The postwar period saw the development of Abstract Expressionism in New York, followed by Pop art, Minimal art, and Conceptual art, and the Museum’s collection has exceptional strength in these areas. Abstract drawings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman open this volume, followed by works by such key figures as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly. Next, drawings by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol signal the arrival of a new figurative art at the forefront of creativity. But reductive and abstract art kept pace, and the Museum’s collection offers a breathtaking array of drawings by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Richard Serra and numerous others. What constitutes “progress” in art is questioned today, and it is no longer possible to see the development of art as a straight line, with synchronicity among places and geographies. But drawing, by its very nature, encourages established understandings to be examined and accepted values to be reappraised. Many of the artists represented here defy easy categorization, including Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Ray Johnson, Jim Nutt and Myron Stout. The resurgence of European art is represented by drawings by Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Piero Manzoni, Henri Michaux, Mario Merz and Sigmar Polke, among others. A number the most important artists working in Latin America in the postwar period are also represented, including Jorge de la Vega, Gego, Leon Ferrari, Helio Oiticica and Mira Schendel. While neither the collection nor this volume is encyclopedic, the spirit and achievements of postwar art are distilled and amply celebrated here.